Tribewanted: Vorovoro

As we look forward to the year to come and the uncertainty as to what will happen after September 1st there is a lot to be excited about. I hope to be able to deliver a more regular, more structured, and more statistically informative report every month or so over the next eight months. Here is how we are planning on measuring the progress we have made to this point and over the months to come as well as a list of some of our main initiatives for 2009

We have broken down our efforts into nine categories and for each one we hope to present as reliable and accurate statistical analysis where possible

EDUCATION

The first category is Education. Our goals in this category are two-fold.

1) To educate the local Mali community and Labasa district about the current state of the global ecosystem, how they can improve their quality of life by adopting new sustainable practices while maintaining their cultural identity, and how their actions can have a beneficial impact on the environment and on the lives of future generations.

2) Second to educate our tribe members and facilitate the remembering of what it feels like to be connected to your environment and those with whom you share it, continue to provide the knowledge resources needed to live a happier more sustainable life, and empower each of you to take action and bear the burden that comes with a privileged life in today’s environmental and social climate.

We have a number of different programs that will help us to reach these goals.

1) Continuing with our weekly on island sustainability forums.
2) Exploring new ways of involving the online tribe
3) Restarting the Mali District Green Club when classes resume at the end of this month.
4) Ongoing Participation with the educational initiatives and revitalization efforts of H.O.P.E Labasa. Our 2009 plan for H.O.P.E. includes
a. Park clean ups and revitalization
b. The creation of road signage as part of our ongoing awareness campaign
c. Starting an environmental; film night at the local cinema
d. Continuing our home waste management seminars and workshops with local women’s groups
e. Murals for walls in need of repainting in town
5) The formation of the Coconut University (name still to be finalized).This University will have a number of programs associated with it including
a. Traditional Fijian Sailing, navigation, and boat building
b. Participation in the Fiji’s Living Human Treasures Program which gathers the last remaining keepers of the ancient cultural traditions to preserve Fiji’s cultural heritage. Each Elder will be invited to stay on Vorovoro for one month to share his or her knowledge with the tribe and the local community.
c. Marine conservation in cooperation with The University of the South Pacific

To report on our progress with our education goals we are developing a number of surveys that should help us to see how well we are doing. We will also be reporting on the status of each of these projects.

COMMUNITY

Our community goals have a significant overlap with our Education goals and the two will mostly be grouped together with the exception of our online community goals. There are two main projects that we are working on for the online community.

1) A more detailed guide to what you can do in your daily lives back home to be more sustainable. To help us do this we are looking to form a partnership with makemesustainable.com .
2) Two of our tribe members, Irina and Steve, are beginning to work on creating a digital presentation template that tribe members can use to help share their experiences on the island and to spread the knowledge that they have gained.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Our goals for infrastructure, like community and education do not really lend themselves to statistical reporting. However, we will keep you updated as progress is made.

LIFESTYLE

Again, statistics will be hard to generate for this. We do however have a new exciting partnership that I am putting together with the Wai Tui Surf Company. Among other things, we will be helping them to move their company in a more sustainable direction.

WATER

The Water project above the waterfall continues to move forward but the rains have slowed us up a bit. When completed we project that we will be able to cover all of our water needs year round. Currently we have enough for drinking, and cooking. During the dry season our water supply drops off and watering the gardens and personal hygiene in the form of fresh water showers becomes limited. We had been measuring our consumption by reading the water levels in the tank but with all the rain we are having our readings are meaning less. We are now looking at tracking down a proper water meter that will give us more accurate data.

WASTE

I was looking at the earlier sustainability reports and was amazed that it was calculated that we were recycling up to 60% of our waste. It was not until we began to weigh our beer bottles from Christmas and New Years that it started to make sense to me. On the whole, I think we are generating much less waste and the waste that we are generating is unfortunately not recyclable. We have significantly cut down on glass bottles, no tin is coming onto the island, all plastic bottles which could be recycled are now being collected to be used to float our new upgraded pontoon. This leaves us with paper products which we are now burning instead of taking to the landfill, non compostables such as candy and crisp wrappers, and reusable items such as margarine containers. We should have the first waste statistics for 2009 out by the end of the first week of September. We will be calculating % based on recycled/reused, landfilled, burnables, and comparing it by weight and number of tribemembers.

FOOD

We have devised a way of coming up with a close approximation of how much food we are producing on the island and I think we will all be very happy to see these new statistics along with our waste stats.

ENERGY

We have some very exciting projects in this area in partnership with True Offsets, our new carbon offsets partner. Jonny Dubowski, one of the founders of the company, and I , have spent the last few weeks finalizing our agreement and should have a memorandum of understanding to show you all very soon. As of now, all of our electricity need, other than batteries for gadgets, comes from the sun and wind. We are looking at a solution for batteries as well as installing a monitor that will tell us how much E we are producing and how much we are using. This will help us to better map out the growth of our energy consumption.

We are also continuing to pursue biodiesel for use in our land transportation and sail power for reef and school trips.

BIODIVERSITY/CONSERVATION

I recently took a trip to Suva and as a result, a team from the University of the South Pacific will be heading to our island to conduct a survey that will provide us with a working list of marine finfish and invertebrates including an assessment of our most valuable marine resources. Traditional lore will also be submitted as well as any traditional use of marine species for medicine, totem, worship, etc. This report will be used to map out a marine conservation plan that we will use to submit grant proposals. These conservation projects will also become part of the Coconut University.

Thinking about progress and measuring it got me to thinking about how we as am society measure progress. The most common measurement of progress for a country is GDP. Can you imagine if we all calculated our personal progress solely on the amount of money we spend? This is essentially what the GDP does. After reading a great article in National Geographic on soil degradation I started to do a bit of research for alternatives to GDP. I wanted to find a measurement system that would include the cost of soil degradation when calculating long term economic progress. While it can take 500 to 1000 years for nature to create one inch of topsoil, it is possible to create several centimeters of top soil in a year under favorable conditions. So, how does one calculate the loss of soil in economic terms? I came across a public policy think tank in California called Redefining Progress that has come up with a system that they call the Genuine Progress Indicator. Here is a brief synopsis of what they say about it.

Genuine Progress Indicator
We believe that if policymakers measure what really matters to people—health care, safety, a clean environment, and other indicators of well-being—economic policy would naturally shift towards sustainability.

Redefining Progress created the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) in 1995 as an alternative to the gross domestic product (GDP). The GPI enables policymakers at the national, state, regional, or local level to measure how well their citizens are doing both economically and socially.

Economists, policymakers, reporters, and the public rely on the GDP as a shorthand indicator of progress; but the GDP is merely a sum of national spending with no distinctions between transactions that add to well-being and those that diminish it.

The GPI is one of the first alternatives to the GDP to be vetted by the scientific community and used regularly by governmental and non-governmental organizations worldwide. Redefining Progress advocates for the adoption of the GPI as a tool for sustainable development and planning.

On a yearly basis, Redefining Progress updates the U.S. Genuine Progress Indicator to document a more truthful picture of economic and social progress. Our latest update, which plots GPI accounts from 1950 to 2004, shows that economic growth has been stagnant since the 1970s.

The GPI includes in its analyses:
Income Distribution, Housework, Volunteering, and Higher Education, Crime, Resource Depletion, Pollution, Long-Term Environmental Damage, Changes in Leisure Time, Defensive Expenditures, Lifespan of Consumer Durables & Public Infrastructure, Dependence on Foreign Assets

To read the whole article go here

I think this is a good reminder of the fact that how we spend our money is one of our most powerful tools we as citizens have at our disposal. With a little conscious effort we can contribute to bring about a positive change.

Here is a good challenge for all of us.

Take one day out of your week, maybe a Sunday would be best. Dedicate that day as no waste day. Only use your feet to get you where you want to go. Don’t buy any food that has been processed or is packaged. Don’t use electricity, try candles instead. Read a book instead of watching tv. Take it as far as you want and report back to us. I’m looking forward to hearing your stories.

Post them here.